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Blogosphere: Research Issues, Tools, and Applications Blogosphere: Research Issues, Tools, and Applications Nitin Agarwal Huan Liu Computer Science and Engineering Department Arizona State University Tempe, AZ 85287 fNitin.Agarwal.2, [email protected] ABSTRACT ging. Acknowledging this fact, Times has named \You" as the person of the year 2006. This has created a consider- Weblogs, or Blogs, have facilitated people to express their able shift in the way information is assimilated by the indi- thoughts, voice their opinions, and share their experiences viduals. This paradigm shift can be attributed to the low and ideas. Individuals experience a sense of community, a barrier to publication and open standards of content genera- feeling of belonging, a bonding that members matter to one tion services like blogs, wikis, collaborative annotation, etc. another and their niche needs will be met through online These services have allowed the mass to contribute and edit interactions. Its open standards and low barrier to publi- articles publicly. Giving access to the mass to contribute cation have transformed information consumers to produc- or edit has also increased collaboration among the people ers. This has created a plethora of open-source intelligence, unlike previously where there was no collaboration as the or \collective wisdom" that acts as the storehouse of over- access to the content was limited to a chosen few. Increased whelming amounts of knowledge about the members, their collaboration has developed collective wisdom on the Inter- environment and the symbiosis between them. Nonetheless, net. \We the media" [21], is a phenomenon named by Dan vast amounts of this knowledge still remain to be discovered Gillmor: a world in which \the former audience", not a few and exploited in its suitable way. In this paper, we intro- people in the back room, now decides what is important. duce various state-of-the-art research issues, review some The \former" consumer of the information becomes the new key elements of research such as tools and methodologies producer, transforming the lecture style of information con- in Blogosphere, and present a case study of identifying the sumption to conversation-based assimilation. influential bloggers in a community to exemplify the integra- tion of some major aspects discussed in this paper. Towards Blogs have also made it easy for the content generators to the end, we also compare and contrast the blogosphere and author content independent of technical challenges of inter- social networks and the research therein. net languages and scripts. Bloggers don't need to worry about the low level programming details, rather they focus only on the content. This simpli¯es the content generation 1. INTRODUCTION TO BLOGOSPHERE process to a great extent and attracts novice or even com- Weblogs or Blogs are becoming one of the most popular puter illiterates to participate in blogging activities. Blogs media of communication and interaction among masses. A provide a platform where anyone can express himself or her- blog can be de¯ned as a website that displays, in reverse self freely without being even restrained by their limited chronological order, the entries by one or more individu- computer knowledge yet being able to publish content on als and usually has links to comments on speci¯c postings. the Internet. Publishing on the Internet also facilitates the Each of these entries are called blog posts. A typical blog readers to comment instantly, giving bloggers a feeling of post can combine text, images, and links to other blogs, satisfaction. web pages, and other media related to its topic. Some blog For many years, psychologists, anthropologists and behav- posts provide a list of links to similar or related blog posts. ioral scientists have studied the societal capabilities of hu- Such a list of links is called blogroll. The ability for read- mans. They present studies and results that substantiate ers to leave comments in an interactive environment is an the fact that humans like engaging themselves in complex important part of blogging. People express their opinions, social relationships and yearn to be a part of social groups. ideas, experiences, thoughts, wishes through these free-form People form communities and groups for the same reasons to writings. The individuals who author the blog posts are re- quench the thirst for social interactions. Often these groups ferred as bloggers. The websites that publish these blog have like-minded members with similar interests who discuss posts are termed as blog sites or blogs. Blog sites of- various issues including politics, economics, technology, life ten provide opinions, commentaries or news on a particular style, entertainment, and what have you. These discussions subject, such as food, politics, or local news; some function could be between two members of the group or involve sev- more like personal online diaries. The universe of all these eral members. blog sites is often referred as Blogosphere. Internet has virtually reduced the distance between any two There has been a tremendous increase in user-generated con- points on Earth to zero. It has made possible for people tent in the past couple of years via the phenomenon of blog- to connect with each other beyond all geographical barriers. Blogs, on the top of it, has tremendously a®ected social in- teractions between people and communities. People not only SIGKDD Explorations Volume 10, Issue 1 Page 18 £ £ £ £ £ © ¥ ¡ ¨§ © ¤ ¢¥¦§ ¨ §© participate in regional matters but also international issues. ¡ ¢ They can connect to people sitting on exactly the other side of globe and discuss whatever they like, i.e., a flat world [18]. & ' ! " # !$ % $ ! " Communities can be spread across several time zones. This ( humongous mesh of social interactions is termed as social ' ' & ) ) $ ! % ! $ * *$ $ ! * $ $ ! networks. Blogs can be considered as a type of social net- + , $ ! $! ! " * $ $ ! " works that encompass interactions between di®erent people, & - . $ $! $ # # #!$% #/ ! $ #!$ % members of a community or members across di®erent com- # * $ " * $ *$ $! $ " munities. Each person in a social network is represented ! as a node and the communications represent the links or - 0 $ $! $ # # $! $ *$ * $ edges among these nodes. Blogosphere comprises of several * $ * $ " $% $ !* # * " focussed groups or communities that can be treated as sub- Table 1: Comparing Individual and Community Blog Sites. graphs. These communities are highly dynamic in nature that have fascinated researchers to study its structural and Blog sites can be categorized into individual blog sites or temporal characteristics. single-authored blog sites and community blog sites There are myriad services o®ered under the umbrella of or multi-authored blog sites. Individual blog sites are social networks along with Blogs. Other services include the ones owned and maintained by an individual. Exam- social friendship networks like Friendster1, Facebook2; col- 3 4 ples of individual blogs could be Sifry's Alerts: David Sifry's laborative annotation like del.icio.us , StumbleUpon that 8 5 musings (Founder & CEO, Technorati), Ratcli®e Blog{Mitch's constitute \folksonomy"; media sharing services like flickr , 9 10 6 7 Open Notebook , The Webquarters etc. On the other YouTube ; and wikis . All these services o®er a fertile hand, community blog sites are owned and maintained by a ground for research. In this paper we focus on the blo- group of like-minded users. Examples of community blogs gosphere. could be Google's O±cial Blog site11, The Uno±cial Apple The popularity and widespread use of blogs can be attributed Weblog12, Engadget13, Boing Boing: A Directory of Won- to the changes brought by Web 2.0 in the way users interact derful Things14 etc. We summarize the di®erences between with the web. Blogs have been around for quite some time individual and community blogs in Table 1. but it became unprecedently popular with the advent of Web Such an interactive information delivery medium like blogs 2.0. Although Web 2.0 may not be a technological shift, it hosts a conducive ground for the virtual communities or changed the way now people interact through the Internet. communities that originate over the Internet. There has People could not only consume information on the Internet been a lot of ongoing research to mine knowledge in Blo- but also contribute to it. Easier, more intuitive interfaces gosphere. This survey is organized as follows: Section 2 with desktop-like experience enticed users to stay connected introduces various issues pertinent to the blogosphere. Sec- and contribute their knowledge in terms of blog posts, wiki tion 3 reviews tools, general methodologies, datasets, and articles, developing folksonomies, etc. Wikis is an excellent performance metrics that are useful for conducting research example of Web 2.0 that slowly takes over online encyclo- in Blogosphere. Section 4 presents a case study. Section 5 pedias due to its sheer breadth of knowledge made possible discusses the connection between Blogosphere and state of by mass editing. Since more and more people are trying to the art social networks. Section 6 concludes the paper with be a part of Web 2.0, it has generated enormous amounts some possible future directions for research in the blogo- of information on the web which is also known as collective sphere. wisdom or open source intelligence. The basic
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